This week the children worked with extraordinary concentration. The flower-arranging works returned to the shelf and were chosen daily, a quiet barometer of the season. A child who in February had simply observed the older children at this work returned to it on Tuesday morning and stayed for forty minutes without speaking.

By Wednesday afternoon, three children were working in parallel, each at their own pace, the materials passed between them with the soft courtesies that come from many weeks of shared work. The room smelled faintly of fresh-cut herbs from the garden, and the windows were open for the first time since October.